Johnny Byrne was one of the most prolific and best respected TV and screenwriters of our time. He wrote for many of British television’s classic series, including All Creatures Great and Small and Doctor Who. As well as writing, he created the hugely successful rural policing drama Heartbeat.

Johnny Byrne was born in 1935 into a Dublin working-class family, the eldest of 13 children. On leaving school he made his way to Liverpool where at the end of the 1950s he organised poetry and jazz sessions at which poets such as Spike Hawkins, Brian Patten and Roger McGough made their debuts, and moved in a circle of writers, painters and musicians who were to become the cultural core of the Swinging Sixties.

From Liverpool he moved first to Oxford and from there to London. Here he began working as a teacher in a school for foreign learners of English, living in a bedsit in Abbey Road, writing science fiction stories on a borrowed typewriter, and publishing “underground” literary magazines which he produced on the school’s hand-cranked duplicating machine. By now he was seriously committed to writing as a career. The year 1969 brought the publication of the sensational novel Groupie, which he co-wrote with Jenny Fabian, a fictionalised first-person account of life and times in the world of late-Sixties London rock’n’roll.

In 1971 he got his first taste of screenwriting with the TV movie Season of the Witch, and in 1972 scripted the Spike Milligan biopic Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. Byrne now engaged full-time in what was to be his lifelong occupation as a writer of TV drama series including Doctor Who, Space 1999, Love Hurts, One by One, Tales of the Unexpected, Noah’s Ark and Heartbeat — a series he created. But perhaps he will be best remembered for his long involvement in the much-loved TV vet series All Creatures Great and Small, for which he was story consultant and wrote some 30 episodes.

In 1975 he was married and moved to a village in Norfolk where he started a family and continued writing at high pressure. His reliability, good humour and fertile creative imagination earned him a solid reputation and the trust of producers and story editors, not to mention that of the actors who spoke his lines. As a result, he was never short of work.

Apart from his talent as a writer, Byrne’s greatest gift was for friendship.

He is survived by his wife, Sandy (née Sandra Carrington-Mail), and three sons.

Johnny Byrne, television screenwriter, was born in 1935. He died of cancer on April 2, 2008, aged about 77